Thursday, April 27, 2017

I've posted some notes from the latest Rendition Infosec Internet wide scans for DOUBLEPULSAR. Despite some reports to the contrary, it's not getting any better. In fact, it's a bit worse than earlier this week despite the uninstallation scripts moving around the Internet (note that Rendition Infosec does NOT recommend using these tools).

Monday, April 24, 2017

After reading some early articles mentioning that DOUBLEPULSAR (reportedly NSA malware) infections were widespread on the Internet, my folks at Rendition Infosec thought the numbers might be inflated due to poorly implemented scans. After performing some of our own scans, we are confident that these numbers are not inflated and at least 3% of the machines with TCP port 445 exposed to the Internet are infected with DOUBLEPULSAR.

Friday, April 21, 2017

Microsoft released their idea of a “Digital Geneva Convention” to help normalize behavior on the cyber battlefield. The document, linked here, is generally well written and documents the need for a document of its type.

While the idea of regulating the cyber domain is not a bad one, the proposal depends on attribution, a field that is sorely lacking in reliability and repeatability. I've outlined some of those problems here.

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

The Shadow Brokers have dumped their cache of exploits for Windows systems (supposedly stolen from NSA). Although some were originally reported as zero-days exploits, this has since been proven to be incorrect due to recent Microsoft patches. However, there's still plenty of business impact. In what I'm sure will be the first of many posts on this topic, I'm focusing on the problem of Windows Server 2003, which continues to be widely deployed.

Read the full post, complete with recommendations for businesses here.

Sunday, April 9, 2017

Russia is likely using the latest Shadow Brokers release to attempt to control the news cycle and take coverage away from the Syria conflict. Yesterday, in a political rant using broken English, the Shadow Brokers released the password for the encrypted zip file they seeded last year (link).

This release gives threat intelligence teams unprecedented insight into the capabilities of the Equation Group hackers. The dump appears to contain only Linux and Unix tools and exploits, so organizations running only Windows don’t need to react to tools in this release (though they should check their available netflow and firewall logs for evidence they have communicated with redirection hosts posted here). For organizations running Linux and/or Unix, it should be noted that most of the exploits target older software version. However the dump is still significant for threat intelligence professionals. Because Equation Group is likely typical of other nation state hacking groups, the dump offers unprecedented insight into the capabilities and targets of an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor.